A magnetic tape originally used to store data.
This idea may remind you of some scenes in old movies: beside a huge mainframe, the wheel rotates intermittently, such as "desk suit" or "Dr.
Strangelove)》.
But the truth is: the tape has not faded!
Desk series tells the love story between engineers and computers. Is it like Bian Xiao watching this movie after reading the article?
In fact, most of the world's data are still kept on tape, including basic scientific data, such as particle physics and radio astronomy, human heritage and national archives, important movies, banking, insurance, oil exploration and other industries. There is even a group of people (including me, who have been trained in materials science, engineering or physics), whose job is to continuously improve the performance of tape storage.
Tape did exist for a long time, but even so, this technology has not been frozen by time and stopped developing. On the contrary, like hard disks and transistors, magnetic tape has made great progress in the past few decades.
The first IBM commercial digital tape storage system model 726 can store about 1. 1 megabyte on a tape.
IBM's first commercial data storage tape
Today, modern tape cartridges can hold 15TB. An automated tape library can contain as much as 278PB of data. To store such a large amount of data, more than 397 million CDs are needed. If these CDs are superimposed, a tower of more than 476 kilometers will be formed.
The disk drive has reached its limit (obviously lack of stamina), but the performance of the tape is getting stronger and stronger.
The rapid development of big data analysis and artificial intelligence provides a powerful incentive mechanism for enterprises, which can use these technologies to analyze all aspects of their business information. Nowadays, financial regulations require companies and institutions to keep records for longer than in the past. Therefore, the data stored by various companies and institutions is becoming more and more jumbled.